Video game characters within the action sector of gaming, for all their appeal, are hardly the most complex individuals ever to spring from the human imagination. Broadly speaking, looking across the board, we have Man With A Traumatic/Mysterious Past, Woman With A Traumatic/Mysterious Past And Large Breasts, and a healthy smattering of garden variety psychopaths. Kane and Lynch are a bit of everything (apart from the breasts), but it's the relationship between them that makes these two action characters so much more interesting than the rest. These are two men 'rescued' from Death Row by a mercenary outfit known only as The Seven; as a consequence, they are effectively enslaved by them and are forced to embark upon a complex and dangerous series of missions to serve their ends. And to make matters worse, they absolutely despise each other.

This is hardly alien territory to Kane, who ended up on Death Row in the first place after years of working as a mercenary with The Seven; it was his betrayal that led them to pursue him even in prison. Kane and Lynch's back-story is one of the most complex I've ever been treated to in a game presentation; indeed, about three quarters of developer IO's time showing the game was spent explaining the characters and their various motivations, which demonstrates exactly how three-dimensional they are. Lynch is, in brief, a murderous schizophrenic who came home one day to find his wife murdered, and isn't at all sure whether or not he was the culprit; more details of Kane and Lynch's previous lives are revealed incrementally as the game's story progresses. The player always controls Kane (with Lynch controllable in co-op play), and you are never entirely sure whether or not to trust Lynch, and don't know what he and The Seven may have in store to make Kane atone for his betrayal. The plot and characters are gritty, complex and fraught with tension, and it's this depth that makes Kane and Lynch especially compelling.

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